Blessed Are the Brokenhearted

But to comfort means to give strength, to infuse courage into another. So when we bring our sinful selves to God and we mourn over our sin, guess what he does? He infuses us with enough strength to carry on. Listen, mourners are not happy because they are mourning.

Don't misunderstand. There is no happiness in mourning. Mourners are happy because they are forgiven. We should be brokenhearted over our sin, but that should lead us to deal with our sin properly. We're going to learn more about that today from Matthew chapter 5. Jesus didn't say, blessed are the powders and complainers and whiners. He said, blessed are the brokenhearted. Today on Wisdom for the Heart, Stephen uncovers the difference between those two. Stephen Davey is working through the passage known as the Beatitudes. This is his second lesson in that series, a lesson called, Blessed are the Brokenhearted.

Open your Bible to Matthew chapter 5 as we get started with today's message from God's Word. During the days of Christ, the Greek island of Cyprus was one of the favorite places for fishing. It was a resort.

If it were as active today as it was, then people would dock their yachts there and play in the sun. They called the island the Makarius Island, literally translated the happy island. The reason this name was used was because it was believed that those who lived on the island of Cyprus had everything necessary for happiness.

They had fresh water, fruit, soil for growing crops, wildlife, beautiful flowers covering the island. Those who could live there would be essentially self-contained. They would have to go nowhere to get anything that they would potentially need for happiness. It was the place to live. In fact, it was believed and so named that if you could live there on that island, you would find happiness. Of course, everyone recognizes eventually that this definition of happiness is flawed, isn't it? Because no matter where you live, maybe you moved into your dream home and then realized you wanted a different dream, right?

Maybe you need another closet, a few hundred more square feet or a back deck or a yard that grows grass or something like that. No matter what you drive, you know, you see somebody driving something else and you'd like to drive that. The Greeks assumed that if you could live where you never needed anything, you never needed anyone, and everything that could sustain life was readily at your fingertips, that person would have it made. That's because the world's definition of happiness has never changed. It's all about I, me, and mine.

Well, in Matthew chapter 5, Jesus Christ comes along and turns that thinking upside down, doesn't he? He delivers the stunning news that happy people are actually bankrupted. They're downtrodden. They're unappreciated. They're persecuted.

They're needy. They're reviled. They're weeping.

They're confessing people. Truth is, that which serves as the structure of our lives, typically, the pleasure, madness, the thrill seeking, the money, the energy, the time, the career, the amusement, the entertainments, they're all expressions of our world's blindness to the very thing that Jesus Christ says will bring true, genuine satisfaction. And what he said was so shocking that when he finished this Sermon on the Mount, the Bible records that his audience was literally shaken. Let's pick up our study at verse 4 in chapter 5 for another shocking revelation of true happiness. Blessed are those who mourn, for they shall be comforted. Now, in verse 3, he's already stated that it isn't the well-connected or the spiritually well put together who find true happiness. It is the spiritually bankrupt.

You go back there and look again. Blessed are the poor in spirit, literally devastated in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven. Now, blessed are the brokenhearted. First, blessed are the beggars. Now, blessed are the brokenhearted.

This is a new approach. Now, the Bible talks about all kinds of mourning and sorrow. In fact, there are nine different verbs in the Greek language which express the idea of grief and sorrow. So it's a pretty good indication that God expected humanity to be suffering and sorrowing and grieving. In fact, Paul tells us that all of fallen creation is literally groaning for the final day of redemption, Romans 8.22.

Christ himself was called the man of what? The man of sorrows, literally the man of pain, acquainted with grief, Isaiah 53.3. Let me give you three or four kinds of mourning and grieving in the Bible fairly quickly. First, the Bible refers openly and unashamedly to tears of loss. Abraham grieved over the loss of his wife in Genesis 23.2. We're told that Abraham mourned. For those who think it is unspiritual to grieve the loss of a loved one need to take note of this giant of the faith.

And they also overlook the example of our own Lord who was shown to be at the graveside of Lazarus, openly weeping because of his love, motivated grief in John 11.35. The strongest, most spiritually minded man to ever walk on the planet shed tears over loss. The Bible refers not only to tears of loss but tears of longing. David longed for an intimate walk with God.

He grieved over the lack of communion that he felt rather deeply. He writes in Psalm 42 as the deer pants for water. So my soul longs for you, O God. My soul thirsts for God. My tears have been my food day and night.

Psalm 42, 1 to 3. There are the tears of Paul longing for the growth and protection of the Ephesian church in Acts chapter 20 verse 31. There are tears that have lost. There are tears of longing.

There are, if I could sort of bundle all the rest for the sake of time up together, I'd just call them the tears of life. Timothy shed tears of discouragement and Paul told him, Listen, I am constantly remembering you as I recall your tears, 2 Timothy 1.4. A father with a sick child in Mark chapter 9 came to him weeping tears of sorrow over the illness of his son.

There were tears of gratitude and devotion from a woman who came to wash the feet of Jesus. Literally it says with her tears, Luke 7 38. There are tears in praying for healing from sickness where Hezekiah was told by the prophet, God has seen your tears and he will heal you, 2 Kings 20 verse 5.

Esther went in and cried tears before the king asking him to change the edict which had brought great sorrow. Master chapter 8 verse 3. Job, you well remember the sufferer said, My eyes pour continually out tears unto God, Job 16 20. There are the tears of the oppressed who suffer the injustices of this planet. In Ecclesiastes chapter 4 verse 1, Paul shed tears over the church in Corinth as he wrote telling them, Even as I am writing you, I am in anguish of heart and weeping many tears, 2 Corinthians chapter 2 verse 4.

That's just the beginning. The truth is growing older in Christ doesn't mean you will cry less, but it certainly redefines what you cry over, doesn't it? Warren Wiersbe records in his commentary about a terrible train accident that killed a number of passengers and in one of the train cars was a mother still holding a little child in her lap. The mother was dead but the child unharmed. When the rescuers took the child away from her mother, the little girl laughed and played, but when the rescue worker noticed her candy was dirty, he gently took it from her and only then she began to cry.

She didn't know anything about death but she knew about candy. What grieves your heart and mine? What causes us to weep? What causes us to mourn and sorrow?

It ought to be different at the age of 50 than it is at the age of 5, right? Trouble is some people at the age of 50 are still crying over candy. They cry over their toys they lose, they cry over a plunge in the stock market, they cry over an estranged marriage or family relationship. They will weep the loss of a promotion but they will never weep the loss of integrity. They mourn for the wrong reasons. In fact, as I studied this particular thought delivered first by our Lord, it struck me that there are a number of types of mourning and grieving in the Bible that are wrong.

Let me give you several of them very quickly as well. First there is diabolical mourning. The mourning of a man or a woman who cannot satisfy their impure lusts.

They're grieved because they lack either money or opportunity or position to simply be able to sin. I saw this first hand. I remember as a high school student working in the toll booths at Portsmouth, Virginia where you'd have to drive your car up and the guy would take your money.

Well, I was one of those guys. Sorry if you drove through there. You drive over that bridge into downtown Norfolk, very beautiful area where I was raised. One night, I'll never forget, one of the older guys working in the booth next to me was just really angry.

He had to work that night. Finally, he told me, he said, look across the bridge. You see across the bridge, you see that huge hotel?

The Omni International Hotel. I said, yeah, I do. He said, look at all those windows.

I said, yeah, I see them. He said, do you realize how many people are in those rooms right now involved in all kinds of wicked stuff and I've got to be here working tonight instead of over there? I was utterly mystified, but it struck me. Here was a man grieving that he wasn't at that moment in the act of sin, but he had to work instead.

This is diabolical. Thomas Watson, the Puritan, wrote, this is the grieving of the devil whose greatest torture is that he can be no more wicked. This is Ahab mourning over Naboth's vineyard. Do you remember in 1 Kings 21 verse 4? He can't get this man's vineyard.

It's part of the family inheritance. And so he's pouting and his wife Jezebel comes along and says, what's wrong? And he tells her and so she goes out, trumps up charges against Naboth, has him killed, gives Ahab the vineyard, which immediately cheered him up. He's pouting. This is diabolical mourning. This is self-centered tears. There is not only diabolical mourning, there's also deceitful mourning.

This is all for show. This is the masquerade of sorrowing just to get attention and garner pity and support. These are the Pharisees who rubbed ashes into their cheeks so that they would look gaunt while they fasted. And Jesus would preach later in this message in Matthew chapter 6, don't look gloomy like the hypocrites for they disfigure their faces that their fasting may be seen by others.

They wanted to appear to be mourning, but it was really nothing more than deceit, self-centered deceitful mourning. This is the person who, by the way, today would be always talking down about themselves. It's actually an attempt to get attention. It's an attempt to have somebody say, no, that's not true, you're really wonderful.

That's just their way of stroking their ego and their pride and their self-centeredness. There is nothing spiritual about acting gloomy. Jesus did not say here in this text, blessed are the gloomy Christians. Blessed are the cheerless Christians.

Charles Spurgeon, the 19th century pastor in London, once remarked that some preachers he knew appeared to have their neckties twisted around their souls. There's nothing spiritual about that. There's also mourning of despair. Not only diabolical and deceitful, but despairing mourning.

This is unhealthy, imbalanced grief that robs the soul of hope. This is Judas who was filled with such a sense of despair knowing he had sinned. In fact, he admitted that to the chief priest in Matthew 27, 4. He said, I have sinned by betraying innocent blood, and then the text adds, he went out and hung himself. He literally drowned himself in despair. Paul wrote to the Corinthians of this kind of hopeless despair. He says, for godly sorrow produces a repentance that leads to salvation without regret, whereas worldly grief produces death. 2 Corinthians 7, 10. Listen, it's no surprise that the occupation which produces the highest level of suicide among all of our professional occupations is within the world of psychology.

Why? Because they have studied the human condition, and they see and they hear of the depravity of the human heart, and without Christ there is no answer. There is no hope.

There is no cleansing cure. Once you discover, in verse 3, the bankruptcy of your heart, you are then led to mourn over your sin, in verse 4, which ultimately brings hope and comfort and forgiveness. Christ is talking here about healthy mourning over the fact that we're sinners, but taking it to Christ for the cure. It's interesting, in Matthew 5, verse 4, he uses the strongest Greek word for mourning. Mourners discover true happiness because they are the only ones who are grieving over their sin and their sinfulness, and they come to the Savior for forgiveness.

Do you know what I'm talking about? Do you know the bittersweet sense of running to the Savior with a towel in your hand to wipe the tears away? The first time you mourned over your sin was when you came to faith in Christ, and your status was changed instantly. From sinner, now your status is what? Saint. The paddle had only begun, hadn't it?

That was the first step. And so 1 John 1.7 tells us that as we confess our sin, the blood of Jesus Christ cleanses us. We forget often that this is talking to Christians about the ongoing experience.

Catharidze, which gives us our word catharsis, his blood cleanses us. The verb indicates that God does more than forgive. He literally erases the stain of that sin. And what's even more encouraging is that the tense is present, active.

It is denoting a continual, ongoing, daily, moment-by-moment process. Listen, the blood of Jesus Christ didn't just cleanse you in the past relative to your status. It constantly cleanses you in the ongoing experience of life. The blood of Christ continually cleanses us from all sin. There is a fountain filled with blood drawn from Immanuel's veins, and sinners plunged beneath that flood lose all their what?

Guilty stain. Dear dying lamb, thy precious blood shall never lose its power till all the ransomed church of God be saved to sin no more. What great truth.

Until our final redemption and glorification, the fountain is never turned off. I remember witnessing to a Hindu some time ago who was cheerful and kind and polite. We were at the mall, just happened to be at the same spot, waiting for our daughters. We struck up a conversation. Of course, I already knew the basic tenets of his religion and how he was on an endless, hopeless cycle of self-improvement, self-salvation. So I still asked him, however, questions about what he believed, and I would interject and eventually got to the point where I could tell him that the distinctive difference between Christianity and Hinduism is that he could never hope with confidence that he was forgiven. And I could.

And it was at that moment that he hung his head. Such sadness came over his face, and he admitted to me that his religion could never provide that kind of confidence. Jesus Christ says, Do you want to know true happiness? Then it isn't about you, because all you can do and all I can do is sin.

We're good at that. That's why his blood has to continually cleanse us. But bring your sin to me, and I can and I will forgive you. Listen to this text. James 4 says, Draw near to God.

He's right into Christians now. Draw near to God, and he will draw near to you. Now, here's how you draw near. Cleanse your hands and purify your hearts. Be wretched and mourn and weep. Mourn, same word here. Be wretched and mourn and weep. Jesus Christ declares in Matthew 5, for those who mourn like that will receive comfort. The word for comfort is the same word which forms the ministry title of our Holy Spirit who's called our comforter.

Same root word. It has the idea of infusing strength and courage. By the way, it's much more than sympathizing. To sympathize means to feel with, and that's a wonderful thing. But to comfort means to give strength, to infuse courage into another. So when we bring our sinful selves to God and we mourn over our sin, guess what he does? He infuses us with enough strength to carry on. Listen, mourners are not happy because they are mourning.

Don't misunderstand. There is no happiness in mourning. Mourners are happy because they are forgiven. Happiness does not come from mourning. It comes from God's response to mourning. It is the confidence and the promise we have in this comfort that will come. Jesus Christ did not say in Matthew 5, verse 4, Blessed are those who mourn, period.

No, blessed are those who mourn, for they shall be comforted. The verb tenses in this text denote continuous action. We continually confess to God, and he continually infuses us with his strength. No wonder the enemy wants us to do anything but keep an eye on our wretchedness. He wants us confident. He wants us to say, we're doing really good. I think we can handle this.

I can make it. Not an eye on our wretched state and our evil heart. He knows that when we then come to Christ, it is then that we are infused with true and genuine strength. Martin Luther, the reformer, wrote in his 95 Theses, at birth the Reformation, he said, Our entire life should be a continuous act of repentance and contrition. In that spirit we find comfort. Let me give you four or five ways we're comforted. First, we discover the comfort of God, where he is the God of all what?

Comfort. 2 Corinthians, chapter 1, verse 3. I remember watching my son climb a tree when he was around four years of age. He and his brother had found a tree out in the woods, beyond our backyard, where somebody had driven nails in, left a little bit of it out so they could get a little foothold.

I had hollered, you know, Be careful! from the deck. I watched him climb, climbed up to the tree, grasped that branch with one hand, and then his foot slipped. There he was hanging with one hand, and his body swung around, and he had one hand around the trunk of that tree, one hand holding on to that branch, and he was too young to have learned that it will hurt less if he hangs on than if he lets go. And he let go, and he skinned his way all the way down that tree.

He was a running scab from the waist up. I moved toward him. As soon as he hit the ground, he came running to me. He was crying, and that's putting it mildly. I mean, it was crying. And I picked him up, and then I held him, and he wailed away.

It's okay to hear out of his ear as a result of that. I didn't stand there. Can you imagine if he ran toward me, and I said, Look, oh, stop right there.

What were you thinking? No, that'll come later. I'll say, Son, it's better to just hang on until somebody comes. Do you think that when you come running to the Father that he will say, Stop, not you again. There he comes again. There she comes. What were you thinking?

No. He never tires of our tears. We find in his strong arms comfort and grace. The enemy would tell you, He's kind of tired of you.

It's been like three times today already. We're comforted by God's Word, secondly. Paul wrote about the encouragement of the Scriptures to give us hope, Romans 15, 4. Third, we're comforted by God's Spirit. Christ promised his disciples, you remember, that God the Father would send another comforter to them, John 14, 16.

A permanent infuser of strength and hope. We are comforted by God. We're comforted by God's Word. We're comforted by God's Spirit. We're comforted by God's people. 2 Corinthians 1, 4 says that God comforts us so that we might be able to comfort those who are in any affliction with the comfort with which we ourselves are comforted by God.

We're in this together. Finally, we're comforted by God's promise. Now remember, God has not promised to completely alleviate the conditions that cause mourning until we're glorified and everything is made right. Finally, Revelation 21, 4 wipes tears from our eyes. You want to know one of the distinctive emotional differences between people in heaven and people in hell?

It is this. Heaven will wipe tears of sorrow and mourning and suffering away. However, we're told that for people in hell, Matthew 8, 12, there will be what? Weeping and gnashing of teeth. There will be everlasting weeping.

How horrible is that? But for those who've come to the forgiveness of Christ for comfort, there will one day be that day when we will weep no more. No wonder we find true happiness in our tears. No wonder Jesus said, you want to know what's going to make you really happy? You know who really happy people are? They are people who recognize their sin and it grieves them and they come to me and they are moment by moment confessors.

They continually bring me their me attitudes and I transform them into be attitudes. Blessed are the broken hearted. When they come to me, they will be comforted.

Not only now, but forever. There really are only two ways to live. You can live for yourself or you can live for Christ.

That's why Stephen's calling this series Overcoming the Me Attitudes. This is wisdom for the heart. Stephen Davey is working his way through a passage of scripture known as the Beatitudes. This is the second lesson in that series, a lesson called Blessed are the Broken Hearted. If you haven't already, I encourage you to install our app to your phone so you can quickly and easily access all of our Bible-based resources. When you're in the app store for your device, the app you're looking for is called Wisdom International.

That's the name of our organization. Our app contains the audio and the transcript of each of these daily Bible messages. We also make available the archive of Stephen's Bible teaching ministry with full-length sermons arranged by Book of the Bible. Our daily Bible reading plan automatically updates with each day's reading so you can follow along with us. The Wisdom International app will work with your smartphone, your tablet, or a smart TV.

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